eBooks are “Fabulous” for this fashion and beauty website.
And now they’ve added a series of eBooks to their marketing mix.
FabulousAfter40.com is a fashion & beauty style hub and social media community dedicated to empowering women in their 40’s and 50’s to look stylish and feel fabulous. With over 100,00 visitors a month and 16,000 members, founders Deborah Boland and JoJami Tyler have created “the place to be” for women seeking shopping sources, exclusive deals, trends, beauty news, and personal connections with other like-minded fashionistas. By partnering with various brands and organizations, Fabulous after 40 provides their community with in-the-know information via daily blog posts, a weekly newsletter, dedicated broadcasts and weekly Twitter/Facebook events.
PRESENTS
“Having ebooks has been one of our main revenue sources,” says co-founder Tyler. “They give us a platform to be experts in our field and our customers want instant ‘how to’ information. Our eBooks provide that for them.” The Fabulous duo didn’t stop at one eBook – they have four currently listed on the website with another on the way. “If your first e-book is well done, your readers will want more. Once you have a happy buyer, they will buy more.”
You’ll have to determine for your own business the pros and cons of content marketing, but consider this: If your 10-page D.I.Y. Plumbing eBook helped someone unclog their own toilet, who do you think they’re going to call when it comes time to install a new bathroom? Yep. You!
• Conversely, if you’ve already written the eBook, chop it up into a series of smaller segments that will fuel your blog with content over the course of several weeks or months. If you use this method, be sure to link from each individual blog post to the landing page where readers can download the whole eBook.
By providing helpful info, you’re building trust and increasing the odds of selling your big-ticket items.
• Be sure to share the individual blog posts (as well as links to the finished eBook’s landing page) on all your social media profiles.
5) EBOOKS HELP YOU GROW YOUR PROSPECT LIST An eBook is one of the most versatile ways to gather prospective clients’ contact info.
How else can you use your shiny, brand new eBook?
• Offer your eBook for free on your website
Now that you’ve created that powerful tool to attract new business and increase the loyalty of existing customers, put it to work! Here are a few more ideas how to maximize its value:
Build a dedicated landing page on your site (for a little extra SEO power) that allows visitors to exchange their name and email address for a free download of the eBook. If you want to get really fancy, you can give them the choice of downloading an ePUB or PDF. • Lure readers to YOUR website Many of your readers will have discovered and purchased your eBook from a big retailer like Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, etc. Since most eBook retailers do not provide customer contact info, you’ll also want to mention your business and experience within the eBook itself in hopes that they’ll seek out more information on your website. Once you’ve enticed readers to visit your own website, they may want to download another eBook in your catalog (thus the importance of making a few different eBooks available) – at which point they’ll be prompted to provide their contact info.
6) EBOOKS HELP YOU BOOST YOUR WEBSITE’S SEO eBooks can also be used in tandem with a blog, further boosting your website’s SEO rankings.
• Enclose it with your quotations and proposals. It’s a low-key, high-quality way to broadcast your credentials. • Offer it in your e-newsletters and in the signature block of your emails. Readers who download your white papers will be favorably influenced to take the actions you prescribe, and some may forward it to their prospects, clients, or customers as email attachments and via regular mail. Since you are giving rather than soliciting, your marketing efforts will be viewed with appreciation rather than resistance. • Be sure to have the download URL ready to go at talks, seminars, and workshops you give. In addition to augmenting your presentations, it can help cultivate relationships and increase business. We’re still on the front-end of the digital publishing revolution. Thousands of businesses have proven the value of using eBooks to increase revenue, establish expertise, bolster brand recognition and loyalty, and grow prospect lists, but even still, it’s relatively unexplored territory. If you get in on the game early, you may just watch your eBook become one of your most powerful viral marketing tools.
If you maintain a blog for your business: • Draw up a content schedule. Then create daily/weekly/monthly content for your blog. Use those blog posts to incrementally build your eBook. No need to stress yourself out writing it all at once!
How to Boost Your Business with eBooks Building your Brand, Prospect List, and Customer Base with eBooks BY CHRIS ROBLEY, MARKETING COORDINATOR
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
Back Cover SO90026155 AHI1145 eBooksBusiness MktProd, ,
PAGE 4
AND STEVEN SPATZ, CMO, BOOKBABY
Front Cover
eBooks aren’t just for fans (and writers) of fiction, memoir, and history. Thousands of businesses are also discovering the value of eBooks, both as an additional revenue stream and as a powerful passive marketing tool that will help you sell your core product or service.
6 reasons why you should be using eBooks to build your business
While the world is just now discovering the benefits of the eBook, this basic concept has been around for awhile under a different name – White Papers. White Paper was the term coined for government reports that were written to help sway public opinion. They tended to be scholarly articles laying out the rationale behind official policy.
1. eBooks can be short. 2. eBooks are inexpensive to produce and easily distributed worldwide. 3. eBooks are growing in popularity every day.
Before long this concept was quickly snapped up by the business community to do essentially the same thing. Corporate white papers served as a key tool for influencing consumer opinion by presenting the benefits of a product or service. White Papers offer useful information instead of directly soliciting business, they break through the marketplace communication overload more effectively than advertising and many other marketing techniques. Contributing to the success of your audience through white papers builds relationships, which in turn builds referrals and revenues.
Your White Paper – or eBook – can take a variety of forms, including: TIMELY NEWS ARTICLES or “buzz pieces” that describe problems faced by your target audience and offer your company’s recommendations for solving them. Putting these real life stories into eBook form allows you to present your approach and capabilities in a professional yet persuasive, soft-sell manner. CASE STUDIES are an extremely popular eBook topic that allows your readers to profit from the experiences of others. As you describe how you helped organizations solve their problems, you will subtly and convincingly showcase your capabilities. SPECIAL REPORTS can be the perfect format for presenting and highlighting industry trends and new developments that are of interest to your readers. When you’re able to support this with your company’s unique perspectives and opinions, this is an excellent way to establish your reputation as a thought leader. HOW-TO GUIDES, CHECKLISTS, AND TOOLKITS are very popular quick reads that are sure to attract a large audience. They can help your clients and customers implement new procedures, avoid potential problems, and develop a thorough understanding of complex challenges. Pound for pound, an eBook can be the most powerful new weapon in your marketing arsenal. Taking the time to write an eBook for your business is one of the best ways to demonstrate your expertise, build brand recognition and loyalty, boost your website’s SEO, engage with clients throughout the buying cycle, and increase your prospective customer base.
4. eBooks help you establish your expertise and build your brand. 5. eBooks help you grow your prospect list.
Then a company like BookBaby can take your file (.doc, .txt, PDF, etc.) and convert it into an attractive eBook that will be readable on all the major devices (Amazon Kindle, Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, Kobo, Copia, and more).
4) E BOOKS HELP YOU ESTABLISH YOUR EXPERTISE
eBooks don’t require fancy cover designs, but a nice cover can certainly help attract readers. If your design skills are lacking, BookBaby offers professional and affordable eBook cover design services.
I don’t care what kind of role you work in; consultant, stock analyst, blogger, booking agent, art courier, railroad engineer, plumber, tinker, tailor, baker, candlestick maker, spy– you have some particular skill and some particular bit of knowledge that someone out there will find useful.
Once you’ve published your eBook through BookBaby, you can use the power of Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and more to turn browsers into buyers, buyers into readers, and readers into clients.
You have an enormous potential audience; everybody wants eBooks!
Now, let’s examine those one at a time, shall we?
• Over 20% of Americans now own eReaders • over 20% of Americans own tablets (like the iPad or Kindle Fire) • 66% of Americans between the ages of 24-35 own smartphones (iPhones, Android, etc.)
1) EBOOKS CAN BE SHORT! Publishers of print books want to recoup their publication, distribution, and marketing costs. That means putting a substantial price tag on the book in an effort to recoup their costs as soon as possible. In order to justify a hefty list price, most print books need to be 150+ pages. As a result, plenty of books (from how-to’s, to self-help, to novels) tend to say a few things well, and then either repeat themselves ad nauseum or head off on wild tangents in order to fill the rest of the pages. While most small business owners should be able to find that volume of content, there’s another commodity that’s always in very short supply: Time! Few entrepreneurs have the luxury of an open calendar to devote to churning out compelling prose. But there’s no standard minimum page-count with eBooks; they can be as short or as long as you need. The point is to share relevant information in an interesting way and if you can squeeze that unique and helpful knowledge into 2 or 3 pages, your readers will find your book all the more valuable for its brevity. So maybe we should add a 1A. eBooks SHOULD be short. A key benefit to producing eBooks is frequency. The shorter your eBooks are, the quicker you’ll produce them; the quicker you produce them, the faster you can build up a robust eBook catalog to attract prospects and customers. This is a place where the whole body of work tends to be greater than the actual sum of its parts. By slicing up your most interesting topics in bite-sized eBooks, you’ll attract a more focused and motivated audience.
“But I’m in the business of doing business,” I hear you say. “I’m no writer!”
2) E BOOKS ARE INEXPENSIVE TO PRODUCE AND EASILY
Fear not. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to share valuable expertise and help a reader overcome the challenges they face. Let’s learn how.
Unlike physical books, eBooks are very cheap to make. The biggest cost consideration is usually the time it takes to write the book itself.
DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
PAGE 2
Why not establish your presence in the business-branded eBook market ahead of the pack?
BookBaby will also distribute your eBook to all the major digital book retailers and pay you 100% of your net earnings (weekly!).
3) EBOOKS ARE GROWING IN POPULARITY EVERY DAY
6. eBooks help you boost your website’s SEO power.
the Apple iBookstore, and other popular eBook stores.
… and these numbers are increasing exponentially. While many European countries still lag behind the US in terms of eBook technology, they’re making the right moves to catch up. Soon enough, EVERYONE will be in the market for eBooks. Over the past 15 years– email, websites, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become ubiquitous tools for conducting and marketing your business. While business-branded eBooks probably won’t be as obligatory as those other tools, customers and clients will become conditioned to search for businesses and testimonials not only on Google, Yelp, and YouTube, but also on Amazon.com,
AND BUILD YOUR BRAND
If you can clearly communicate that knowledge in an eBook, your reader will: • trust your credibility and competency • be more likely to purchase your product • subscribe to your service • hire you for a job • recommend you to a friend Don’t stress about writing the definitive masterpiece on the subject– just add something valuable to the conversation. You’re not writing the great American novel. Instead, simply outline the information you want to share; use a confident, straightforward tone– and keep on track. If you do, your book will be useful to readers– and if it’s useful, it’ll sell– all the while increasing brand awareness and loyalty. Now some of you might be asking, “If I’m a plumber, why in the hell would I want to write a book teaching people how to unclog their own toilets? Then they won’t hire me!” continued on page 4
Writing an eBook in her spare time adds five figures to the family income. Angela England is one busy woman. The happily married mother of four – with another on the way – spends a lot of time tending to her urban homestead and homeschooling her children. But that doesn’t stop her from adding to the family income through her roles as Editorin-Chief of Blissfully Domestic online magazine, professional blogger and freelance writer. Tying it all together are the eBooks that England has written. In her latest book, 30 Days to Make and Sell a Fabulous EBook, she shares generously what she’s learned to be successful.
her family’s income last year in between everything else. “The topics of the book helped me secure new speaking opportunities and new clients. The sales from the eBooks increased with each new title as I learned how to market myself better, and developed a larger, more enthusiastic audience. I’m a firm believer in the ability of eBooks to help in a variety of ways and help others break down the steps needed in 30 Days to Make and Sell a Fabulous Ebook.” Creating her eBook wasn’t as easy as England had imagined starting out. “I didn’t fully understand the difference between blogging and writing a book until I tackled the project,” she says. “The act of book writing itself helped me learn how to pace my writing to tell the story through a broader, full-length project. All these skills helped me when I got a book deal earlier this year to write Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less) which will be published through Alpha Books in December 2012.”
“Self-publishing a series of eBooks helped me build my writing career in a variety of ways,“ says England, who was able to add five extra figures to
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
3 SO90026155 AHI1145 eBooksBusiness MktProd, ,
PAGE 3
eBooks aren’t just for fans (and writers) of fiction, memoir, and history. Thousands of businesses are also discovering the value of eBooks, both as an additional revenue stream and as a powerful passive marketing tool that will help you sell your core product or service.
6 reasons why you should be using eBooks to build your business
While the world is just now discovering the benefits of the eBook, this basic concept has been around for awhile under a different name – White Papers. White Paper was the term coined for government reports that were written to help sway public opinion. They tended to be scholarly articles laying out the rationale behind official policy.
1. eBooks can be short. 2. eBooks are inexpensive to produce and easily distributed worldwide. 3. eBooks are growing in popularity every day.
Before long this concept was quickly snapped up by the business community to do essentially the same thing. Corporate white papers served as a key tool for influencing consumer opinion by presenting the benefits of a product or service. White Papers offer useful information instead of directly soliciting business, they break through the marketplace communication overload more effectively than advertising and many other marketing techniques. Contributing to the success of your audience through white papers builds relationships, which in turn builds referrals and revenues.
Your White Paper – or eBook – can take a variety of forms, including: TIMELY NEWS ARTICLES or “buzz pieces” that describe problems faced by your target audience and offer your company’s recommendations for solving them. Putting these real life stories into eBook form allows you to present your approach and capabilities in a professional yet persuasive, soft-sell manner. CASE STUDIES are an extremely popular eBook topic that allows your readers to profit from the experiences of others. As you describe how you helped organizations solve their problems, you will subtly and convincingly showcase your capabilities. SPECIAL REPORTS can be the perfect format for presenting and highlighting industry trends and new developments that are of interest to your readers. When you’re able to support this with your company’s unique perspectives and opinions, this is an excellent way to establish your reputation as a thought leader. HOW-TO GUIDES, CHECKLISTS, AND TOOLKITS are very popular quick reads that are sure to attract a large audience. They can help your clients and customers implement new procedures, avoid potential problems, and develop a thorough understanding of complex challenges. Pound for pound, an eBook can be the most powerful new weapon in your marketing arsenal. Taking the time to write an eBook for your business is one of the best ways to demonstrate your expertise, build brand recognition and loyalty, boost your website’s SEO, engage with clients throughout the buying cycle, and increase your prospective customer base.
4. eBooks help you establish your expertise and build your brand. 5. eBooks help you grow your prospect list.
Then a company like BookBaby can take your file (.doc, .txt, PDF, etc.) and convert it into an attractive eBook that will be readable on all the major devices (Amazon Kindle, Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, Kobo, Copia, and more).
4) E BOOKS HELP YOU ESTABLISH YOUR EXPERTISE
eBooks don’t require fancy cover designs, but a nice cover can certainly help attract readers. If your design skills are lacking, BookBaby offers professional and affordable eBook cover design services.
I don’t care what kind of role you work in; consultant, stock analyst, blogger, booking agent, art courier, railroad engineer, plumber, tinker, tailor, baker, candlestick maker, spy– you have some particular skill and some particular bit of knowledge that someone out there will find useful.
Once you’ve published your eBook through BookBaby, you can use the power of Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and more to turn browsers into buyers, buyers into readers, and readers into clients.
You have an enormous potential audience; everybody wants eBooks!
Now, let’s examine those one at a time, shall we?
• Over 20% of Americans now own eReaders • over 20% of Americans own tablets (like the iPad or Kindle Fire) • 66% of Americans between the ages of 24-35 own smartphones (iPhones, Android, etc.)
1) EBOOKS CAN BE SHORT! Publishers of print books want to recoup their publication, distribution, and marketing costs. That means putting a substantial price tag on the book in an effort to recoup their costs as soon as possible. In order to justify a hefty list price, most print books need to be 150+ pages. As a result, plenty of books (from how-to’s, to self-help, to novels) tend to say a few things well, and then either repeat themselves ad nauseum or head off on wild tangents in order to fill the rest of the pages. While most small business owners should be able to find that volume of content, there’s another commodity that’s always in very short supply: Time! Few entrepreneurs have the luxury of an open calendar to devote to churning out compelling prose. But there’s no standard minimum page-count with eBooks; they can be as short or as long as you need. The point is to share relevant information in an interesting way and if you can squeeze that unique and helpful knowledge into 2 or 3 pages, your readers will find your book all the more valuable for its brevity. So maybe we should add a 1A. eBooks SHOULD be short. A key benefit to producing eBooks is frequency. The shorter your eBooks are, the quicker you’ll produce them; the quicker you produce them, the faster you can build up a robust eBook catalog to attract prospects and customers. This is a place where the whole body of work tends to be greater than the actual sum of its parts. By slicing up your most interesting topics in bite-sized eBooks, you’ll attract a more focused and motivated audience.
“But I’m in the business of doing business,” I hear you say. “I’m no writer!”
2) E BOOKS ARE INEXPENSIVE TO PRODUCE AND EASILY
Fear not. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to share valuable expertise and help a reader overcome the challenges they face. Let’s learn how.
Unlike physical books, eBooks are very cheap to make. The biggest cost consideration is usually the time it takes to write the book itself.
DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
PAGE 2
Why not establish your presence in the business-branded eBook market ahead of the pack?
BookBaby will also distribute your eBook to all the major digital book retailers and pay you 100% of your net earnings (weekly!).
3) EBOOKS ARE GROWING IN POPULARITY EVERY DAY
6. eBooks help you boost your website’s SEO power.
the Apple iBookstore, and other popular eBook stores.
… and these numbers are increasing exponentially. While many European countries still lag behind the US in terms of eBook technology, they’re making the right moves to catch up. Soon enough, EVERYONE will be in the market for eBooks. Over the past 15 years– email, websites, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become ubiquitous tools for conducting and marketing your business. While business-branded eBooks probably won’t be as obligatory as those other tools, customers and clients will become conditioned to search for businesses and testimonials not only on Google, Yelp, and YouTube, but also on Amazon.com,
AND BUILD YOUR BRAND
If you can clearly communicate that knowledge in an eBook, your reader will: • trust your credibility and competency • be more likely to purchase your product • subscribe to your service • hire you for a job • recommend you to a friend Don’t stress about writing the definitive masterpiece on the subject– just add something valuable to the conversation. You’re not writing the great American novel. Instead, simply outline the information you want to share; use a confident, straightforward tone– and keep on track. If you do, your book will be useful to readers– and if it’s useful, it’ll sell– all the while increasing brand awareness and loyalty. Now some of you might be asking, “If I’m a plumber, why in the hell would I want to write a book teaching people how to unclog their own toilets? Then they won’t hire me!” continued on page 4
Writing an eBook in her spare time adds five figures to the family income. Angela England is one busy woman. The happily married mother of four – with another on the way – spends a lot of time tending to her urban homestead and homeschooling her children. But that doesn’t stop her from adding to the family income through her roles as Editorin-Chief of Blissfully Domestic online magazine, professional blogger and freelance writer. Tying it all together are the eBooks that England has written. In her latest book, 30 Days to Make and Sell a Fabulous EBook, she shares generously what she’s learned to be successful.
her family’s income last year in between everything else. “The topics of the book helped me secure new speaking opportunities and new clients. The sales from the eBooks increased with each new title as I learned how to market myself better, and developed a larger, more enthusiastic audience. I’m a firm believer in the ability of eBooks to help in a variety of ways and help others break down the steps needed in 30 Days to Make and Sell a Fabulous Ebook.” Creating her eBook wasn’t as easy as England had imagined starting out. “I didn’t fully understand the difference between blogging and writing a book until I tackled the project,” she says. “The act of book writing itself helped me learn how to pace my writing to tell the story through a broader, full-length project. All these skills helped me when I got a book deal earlier this year to write Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less) which will be published through Alpha Books in December 2012.”
“Self-publishing a series of eBooks helped me build my writing career in a variety of ways,“ says England, who was able to add five extra figures to
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
3 SO90026155 AHI1145 eBooksBusiness MktProd, ,
PAGE 3
eBooks are “Fabulous” for this fashion and beauty website.
And now they’ve added a series of eBooks to their marketing mix.
FabulousAfter40.com is a fashion & beauty style hub and social media community dedicated to empowering women in their 40’s and 50’s to look stylish and feel fabulous. With over 100,00 visitors a month and 16,000 members, founders Deborah Boland and JoJami Tyler have created “the place to be” for women seeking shopping sources, exclusive deals, trends, beauty news, and personal connections with other like-minded fashionistas. By partnering with various brands and organizations, Fabulous after 40 provides their community with in-the-know information via daily blog posts, a weekly newsletter, dedicated broadcasts and weekly Twitter/Facebook events.
PRESENTS
“Having ebooks has been one of our main revenue sources,” says co-founder Tyler. “They give us a platform to be experts in our field and our customers want instant ‘how to’ information. Our eBooks provide that for them.” The Fabulous duo didn’t stop at one eBook – they have four currently listed on the website with another on the way. “If your first e-book is well done, your readers will want more. Once you have a happy buyer, they will buy more.”
You’ll have to determine for your own business the pros and cons of content marketing, but consider this: If your 10-page D.I.Y. Plumbing eBook helped someone unclog their own toilet, who do you think they’re going to call when it comes time to install a new bathroom? Yep. You!
• Conversely, if you’ve already written the eBook, chop it up into a series of smaller segments that will fuel your blog with content over the course of several weeks or months. If you use this method, be sure to link from each individual blog post to the landing page where readers can download the whole eBook.
By providing helpful info, you’re building trust and increasing the odds of selling your big-ticket items.
• Be sure to share the individual blog posts (as well as links to the finished eBook’s landing page) on all your social media profiles.
5) EBOOKS HELP YOU GROW YOUR PROSPECT LIST An eBook is one of the most versatile ways to gather prospective clients’ contact info.
How else can you use your shiny, brand new eBook?
• Offer your eBook for free on your website
Now that you’ve created that powerful tool to attract new business and increase the loyalty of existing customers, put it to work! Here are a few more ideas how to maximize its value:
Build a dedicated landing page on your site (for a little extra SEO power) that allows visitors to exchange their name and email address for a free download of the eBook. If you want to get really fancy, you can give them the choice of downloading an ePUB or PDF. • Lure readers to YOUR website Many of your readers will have discovered and purchased your eBook from a big retailer like Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, etc. Since most eBook retailers do not provide customer contact info, you’ll also want to mention your business and experience within the eBook itself in hopes that they’ll seek out more information on your website. Once you’ve enticed readers to visit your own website, they may want to download another eBook in your catalog (thus the importance of making a few different eBooks available) – at which point they’ll be prompted to provide their contact info.
6) EBOOKS HELP YOU BOOST YOUR WEBSITE’S SEO eBooks can also be used in tandem with a blog, further boosting your website’s SEO rankings.
• Enclose it with your quotations and proposals. It’s a low-key, high-quality way to broadcast your credentials. • Offer it in your e-newsletters and in the signature block of your emails. Readers who download your white papers will be favorably influenced to take the actions you prescribe, and some may forward it to their prospects, clients, or customers as email attachments and via regular mail. Since you are giving rather than soliciting, your marketing efforts will be viewed with appreciation rather than resistance. • Be sure to have the download URL ready to go at talks, seminars, and workshops you give. In addition to augmenting your presentations, it can help cultivate relationships and increase business. We’re still on the front-end of the digital publishing revolution. Thousands of businesses have proven the value of using eBooks to increase revenue, establish expertise, bolster brand recognition and loyalty, and grow prospect lists, but even still, it’s relatively unexplored territory. If you get in on the game early, you may just watch your eBook become one of your most powerful viral marketing tools.
If you maintain a blog for your business: • Draw up a content schedule. Then create daily/weekly/monthly content for your blog. Use those blog posts to incrementally build your eBook. No need to stress yourself out writing it all at once!
How to Boost Your Business with eBooks Building your Brand, Prospect List, and Customer Base with eBooks BY CHRIS ROBLEY, MARKETING COORDINATOR
www.bookbaby.com | 877-961-6878
Back Cover SO90026155 AHI1145 eBooksBusiness MktProd, ,
PAGE 4
AND STEVEN SPATZ, CMO, BOOKBABY
Front Cover